The present invention relates to a portable radio communication terminal and expression style processing method and, more particularly, to a portable radio communication terminal which generates and edits an expression style format for expressing image data or character data in a desired format, and an expression style processing method.
Recent portable radio communication terminals receive multimedia contents including various kinds of digital data such as character data, image data, and voice data from an information providing system such as home pages on the Internet and display the contents. A content of this type is expressed using an expression style format formed from a description language such as the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or step SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). A portable radio communication terminal displays a multimedia content on the basis of this expression style format. Processing of such an expression style format is called style processing.
Style processing in a conventional portable radio communication terminal will be described below with reference to FIG. 16. Referring to FIG. 16, a conventional portable radio communication terminal comprises a radio section 108 for performing radio communication with the radio base station of a portable telephone system, a transmission/reception data processing section 109 for executing communication protocol processing for radio communication, a display processing section 113 for executing display processing of character/image data, a display device 114 for displaying display data from the display processing section 113, a description language memory 116 for storing a description language such as the HTML or XML (extensible Markup Language), an image memory 117 for storing image data, a voice data memory 125 for storing voice data, a voice playback processing section 123 for executing voice playback processing, a speaker 124 for converting the output from the voice playback processing section 123 to an audible signal, and a CPU (Central Processing Unit) 126 for controlling the entire portable radio communication terminal.
FIG. 17 shows style processing by the portable radio communication terminal shown in FIG. 16. Object acquisition operation and display operation will be described. Referring to FIG. 17, in accordance with an instruction for download from a home page or file server by user operation (step S201), when the target of the download instruction is voice data, the designated voice data is downloaded (step S202) and stored in the voice data memory 125 (step S203). When the target of the download instruction is image data, the designated image data is downloaded (step S204) and stored in the image memory 117 (step S205).
When the target of the download instruction is a description language, the designated description language is downloaded (step S206) and stored in the description language memory 116 (step S207), and then, the description language is analyzed (step S208). After the end of the download instruction by user operation, if the description language is a description language with style such as the HTML style sheet or step SMIL, the character/image data is displayed on the display device 114, and the voice data is processed by the voice playback processing section 123 and played back from the speaker 124 (step S209).
However, the above-described conventional portable radio communication terminal executes only simple style processing and therefore has the following problem.
As the first problem, since the style designation is fixed by the content provider, the user of the portable radio communication terminal cannot freely generate a content. As the second problem, since an operation of automatically browsing a content without style designation in the terminal is impossible, the same user operation is required to reconstruct the same content, resulting in cumbersomeness. As the third problem, since a plurality of image data are separately prepared and synthesized by style description for every display, this scheme is unsuitable for a portable radio communication terminal with a limited memory.
As a method of customizing the service providing method, a technique of issuing an instruction from a portable radio communication terminal to a server is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-223062. However, according to this method, customization must be instructed from the terminal to the server every time, and the user cannot customize the service providing method by operating only the portable radio terminal.
Techniques of generating a content having a desired layout using a relatively large-scaled information processing apparatus such as a personal computer have been proposed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Nos. 910-222508, 11-96144, and 11-238053. However, these techniques do not assume a portable radio communication terminal having a limited memory capacity.